Asus Radeon R9 Fury Strix DC3 OC

Today we take a look at the second Fury card to hit our labs, the Asus Radeon R9 Fury Strix. This card ships with the latest Asus DirectCU III cooler and a very modest overclock, activated directly via ASUS GPU Tweak 2 software. I was impressed with the Sapphire Tri-X R9 Fury when I tested it last week, so we will see today if Asus are able to bat at the same level.

There is no doubt that Fury is an important SKU for AMD as it is priced around £80+ less than the flagship Fury X, subsequently targeting a broader enthusiast audience interested in buying a modified GTX980.

If you want a brief recap of Fiji, the new architecture and HBM memory, visit this page.

GPU

R9 390X

R9 290X

R9 390

R9 290

R9 380

R9 285

Fury X

Fury

Launch

June 2015

Oct 2013

June 2015

Nov 2013

June 2015

Sep 2014

June 2015

June 2015

DX Support

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

Process (nm)

28

28

28

28

28

28

28

28

Processors

2816

2816

2560

2560

1792

1792

4096

3584

Texture Units

176

176

160

160

112

112

256

224

ROP’s

64

64

64

64

32

32

64

64

Boost CPU Clock

1050

1000

1000

947

970

918

1050

1000

Memory Clock

6000

5000

6000

5000

5700

5500

500

500

Memory Bus (bits)

512

512

512

512

256

256

4096

4096

Max Bandwidth (GB/s)

384

320

384

320

182.4

176

512

512

Memory Size (MB)

8192

4096

8192

4096

4096

2048

4096

4096

Transistors (mn)

6200

6200

6200

6200

5000

5000

8900

8900

TDP (watts)

275

290

275

275

190

190

275

275

When we first started testing the Asus R9 Fury STRIX DC3 we noticed that the core speed was set at 1000mhz, yet Overclockers UK have the card listed as an ‘OC’ model HERE. I contacted ASUS UK about the 20mhz difference and they told me that the clock boost is tied into their latest version of GPU Tweak 2, shown in the image above. Yes, there is only one R9 Fury model available from ASUS.

ASUS could have simply just set the BIOS clock speed to 1,020mhz and done away with the need for any software at all.

So is this card classed as an ‘OC’ model or not? If you install the proprietary software and click the OC button, then yes it is, but for those people who don’t install the software, its running at AMD’s reference clock speeds of 1,000mhz. We tested as Asus requested, at 1,020mhz with GPU Tweak 2 running in OC mode. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but a little bewildering. On a brighter note, Asus GPU Tweak 2 is actually a really good piece of software, and appears to run in a very stable manner.

The AMD R9 Fury GPU is built on the 28nm process and is equipped with 64 ROPS, 224 texture units and 3,584 shaders. The more expensive Fury X has 64 ROPS, 256 Texture units and 4,096 shaders. They both have 4GB of HBM (Hynix) memory across a super wide 4096 bit memory interface. Bandwidth rating for both cards is 512 GB/s.